Urban Ecosystem Justice

Strategies for Equitable Sustainability and Ecological Literacy in the City

Scott Kellogg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000450675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Merging together the fields of urban ecology, environmental justice, and urban environmental education, Urban Ecosystem Justice promotes building fair, accessible, and mutually beneficial relationships between citizens and the soils, water, atmospheres, and biodiversity in their cities.

This book provides a framework for re-centering issues of justice and fairness in sustainability discourse while challenging the profound ecological alienation experienced by urban residents. While the urban sustainability movement has had many successes in the past few decades, there remain areas for it to grow. For one, the benefits of sustainability have disproportionately benefited wealthier city residents, with concerns over equity, justice, and social sustainability frequently taking a back seat to economic and environmental considerations. Additionally, many city dwellers remain estranged from and unfamiliar with ecological processes, with urban environments often thought of as existing outside of nature or as hopelessly degraded. Through a citizen-centered lens, the book offers a guide to reconciling these issues by demonstrating how questions of equity, access, and justice apply to the biophysical dimensions of the urban ecosystem: soil, water, air, waste, and biodiversity. Drawing heavily from the fields of urban ecology, environmental justice, and ecological design, this book lays out a science of cities for people: a pedagogical platform that can be used to promote ecological literacy in underrepresented urban communities through affordable and decentralized means.

This book provides both a theoretical and practical field guide to students and researchers of urban sustainability, city planners, architects, policymakers, and activists wishing to develop reciprocal relationships with urban ecologies.

Part I Urban ecosystem justice – a chaotic bricolage of concepts

1 Ecological alienation – roots and remedies

DOI: 10.4324/9780367858711-2

Nature–society dualism, complexity, nonlinearity, and the emergence of socio-ecological systems studies

An important prerequisite for understanding the origins of urban ecological alienation and of social sustainability exclusion is a familiarity with the history of nature–society dualism and the influence it has had on modernist thinking. The reconciliation of this false and destructive dualism is central to the creation of not only urban ecosystem justice but social and ecological regeneration more broadly.

The relationship between humanity and nature has been a subject of study for centuries. Conventionally framed in the past as a nature–society dualism, this dichotomy has been called “the key foundation of modernist epistemology” (Descola, 1996). Challenged by many social scientists and philosophers who believe this division between nature and culture to be false, many social theorists have proposed that humanity and nature have always been intertwined with one another, each being a coevolutionary product of the other (Figure 1.1). The more recent histories of romanticism and of frontier idealism have only further reified the mythology of a pristine wilderness separate from humanity, made possible only through the erasure of the indigenous societies that once dwelled there in relative sustainable reciprocity for centuries (Cronon, 1996). The nature–society dualism has long been reinforced by modern scientific institutions as well. This division has been reinforced by the separation of academic disciplines into the demarcated categories of the social and biophysical sciences (Capra, 2014). The reluctance of researchers on either side of the divide to cross the boundary has only furthered the disciplinary schism, leading to a “balkanization of knowledge” (McClintock, 2010). Within the biophysical sciences there is a dominant mentality of reductionism that professes to understand the world by breaking systems down into their respective subcomponents, inappropriately imposing a mechanistic worldview upon complex adaptive systems that exhibit emergent properties arising from the interactions of their many diverse parts (Levin, 1999). The rigidity of scientific determinism has contributed to a research culture that fetishizes quantification, a methodology whose limits become apparent when we consider how much in the world we choose not to measure, cannot be measured, or is unmeasurable (Eisenstein, 2018).

Figure 1.1 Modernity and Nature–Society Dualism
Source: photo by Elly Kellogg

Developments in the field of nonlinear mathematics in the latter part of the twentieth century, however, have given biophysical scientists an improved language and mechanisms for understanding many of the complex dynamics that characterize biological and ecological systems. These theoretical developments have created an upheaval in the ecological sciences that has resulted in a rejection of the classical view of ecosystems as static, stable, single-equilibrium phenomena. The latter paradigm has been supplanted with the recognition of ecological environments as complex, dynamic, chaotic, multi-equilibria systems. This reconceptualization has created the space for researchers to be more aware of the role that complex relationships and interactions between humans and non-humans have in shaping ecosystem form and function. Rejection of the notion of environmental forces as static and “in balance” has been embraced by a number of sociological disciplines and in turn has inspired them to abandon modernist ideas of linear social orders (Scoones, 1999). A number of socio-scientific boundary spanning disciplines have since emerged, organized around a shared interest in complex non-homeostatic systems. These include political ecology (the study of how social, political, and economic factors relate to environmental change), environmental history, ecological economics, historical ecology, ethnobiology, environmental sociology, traditional ecological knowledge, and science and technology studies. A growing recognition among even some ecologists is that human and natural systems are inherently interwoven, and that it is virtually impossible to study one in the absence of the other, leading ecology to be described as a “science of hybrid social and ecological systems” (Kueffer, 2015).

There is now a growing movement – scientific, philosophical, ecological, cultural, pedagogical, political – among activists and scholars alike that seeks to root out and challenge the deeply entrenched dualism of nature and society that is arguably responsible for driving much of the social and ecological degradation on the planet today. Looking back through history, it is evident that nature–society dualism is a fairly recent and eurocentric construct, with many instances of human societies living in “discordant harmony” with their environments (Botkin, 1992).

Anthropogenic ecosystems and anthromes

Spawning from nature–society dualism, urban ecological alienation can be in part traced to ideological and philosophical legacies that remain encoded in cultural attitudes of the present day, chiefly in the ideas that humans are separate from nature, that cities are not ecosystems, humans always have a degenerative impact on their supportive environments, and that the only way to be an environmentalist is to minimize your impact in every regard short of dying. Many people are unaware of the rich complexity of interwoven human–ecological relationships, both ancient and modern, and that history provides us with many examples of these relationships being regenerative, reciprocal, and sustained. A discussion around the existence and nature of anthropogenic ecosystems can be a starting point from which to challenge common misconceptions about human ecologies and for reframing of cities as (potentially) regenerative ecosystems.

Anthropogenic ecosystems are ecologies that have been either created by humans or heavily influenced by human activity, spanning a continuum of high-density cities to less populated “wild” environments that are shaped, tended to, or have coevolved with homo sapiens to varying degrees (Anderson, 2013).¹ Beyond an urban ecosystem justice framework, an analysis of anthropogenic ecosystems is central to nature–culture studies as so many of society’s attitudes toward the earth and the non-human are informed and determined by the quality of the relationships which people have with “cultural landscapes” (Plieninger, 2012).

Understanding the varying natures of these relationships is critical for challenging the dominant Western cultural narrative that human activity inevitably results in the devastation of landscapes with unavoidable losses of ecological integrity. While this pattern may accurately characterize the trajectory of modern-day capitalist society, it is heartening to know that other human cultures have sustainably lived in the same lands for centuries while having a regenerative impact on their supportive ecosystems, at times resulting in increases in soil fertility, biodiversity, and landscape variation (Balée, 2006).² Disciplines of historical ecology (Crumley, 2018) and traditional ecological knowledge or TEK (Berkes, 2017) have provided considerable empirical evidence to support this assertation, while explorations of the sustainability of ancient cities may provide useful guidance to the urban predicaments of today (Barthel, 2013). Agroecology (Gliessman, 1998) and perma-culture (Mollison, 1988) are two current practices that seek to re-create reciprocal human–landscape relationships that in some part draw upon the knowledge of past and present regenerative cultures.³

A second aspect of anthropogenic ecosystems that is crucial for understanding is that pre-industrial human societies could have significant impacts on both their local ecosystems and the global climate as well. Recent archaeological revelations have shown how the North American continent was an intensively managed agroecological system that, while unrecognizable as such to early European explorers, was capable of providing game, nuts, fruit, herbs, shelter, fungi, and fuel in amounts sufficient to sustain a population of 40–80 million indigenous people (Mann, 2005). “The great dying” (Figure 1.2) or mass die-off of 95 percent of indigenous peoples as a consequence of colonialization and exposure to European pathogens, along with the subsequent vegetative regrowth of once-cultivated land (equivalent in area to the state of California), resulted in an uptake of 2–17 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide (Koch, 2019). This reduction of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in turn contributed to triggering a period of significant planetary cooling in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution named “the little ice age” (Dull, 2010). Similarly, it has been postulated that ancient rice farmers increased global temperatures inadvertently through their agricultural practices. When vegetated areas are flooded (necessary for producing a rice field), organic matter breaks down anaerobically under water producing methane, a heat-trapping gas significantly more potent than carbon dioxide (Ruddiman, 2010).

Figure 1.2 The Great Dying – Drawn by a French Missionary of Abenaki in Maine During a Smallpox Epidemic in 1740

Understanding the past role that humans have played in shaping the earth’s climate can help to give a perspective on today’s environmental predicaments if only to make us aware of the extent of anthropogenic influences on the planet and their potential repercussions in even pre-industrial times. It is a reminder of both systemic interconnectedness on what can often seem like a vast world and that humans and nature have a long, coevolutionary, cocreating relationship. Inasmuch as this can help us to frame even highly anthropogenic spaces, such as cities as less un-natural, it is a starting point for opening conversations about the potential for just and regenerative anthroecologies. While it is true that the activities of early cultures could have wide-ranging effects on climatic processes, care must be taken that this fact is not used discursively to condone or justify continuing negligent abuse of the earth’s climate or its haphazard manipulation through irresponsible geoengineering practices (Hamilton, 2013). Ecological modernists have already attempted this, arguing that since humans have always had environmental impacts there is nothing misguided about technologically manipulating climatic processes, concentrating humans into bubbled cities, or scaling up nuclear energy without regard for matters of power or politics (Crist, 2016).

Closely related to the idea of anthropogenic ecosystems is the concept of “anthromes” as developed by geographer Erle Ellis (Ellis, 2010). A portmanteau of anthropological and biome, anthromes are intended to reflect the reality that 75 percent of the ice-free land on the planet is under some form of use or cultivation and that traditional maps of planetary biomes (tundra, desert, rainforest, etc.) are more accurately representative of the world as it was, rather than as it is. The anthromes map consists of a display of twenty-one anthropogenic environments placed on a continuum accordingly to the extent of human use occurring there. They range from relatively undisturbed “wild lands” at one end of the spectrum to dense urban settlements at the other. In between exist a variety of other cultivated spaces including rangelands, croplands, and villages. These delineations layer fairly easily on top of the “zones” concept of permaculture, a system used to designate areas of a landscape for relatively intensive or extensive appropriate uses according to their distance from “home” (Mollison, 1988). As such, anthromes maps can be helpful for conceptualizing the world according to the intensity of its anthropogenic influence and as such may be useful for making decisions regarding biodiversity planning, agriculture, agroforestry, and so on.

On the surface, the anthromes concept seems like a straightforward enough representation of anthropogenic activity that is presented in a politically neutral format. Attention must be paid, though, to how the concept could be used for either progressive or regressive purposes. Anthromes could potentially be used to justify the continued exploitation and degeneration of anthropogenic environments, with an argument reasoning “well, since these environments are already affected by humans and are therefore unnatural, what is the sense in trying to protect them?” What the anthromes map cannot account for is the quality of the relationships that humans have with the ecosystems they are in: regenerative or degenerative, reciprocal or parasitic, egalitarian or autocratic. In the absence of a more nuanced analysis, the potential for abuse is latent and high. Additionally, Ellis’s concept of “Anthroecological succession”, a term referring to the processes by which humans transform anthrome environments over time and affect the non-human species living there, is fraught with themes of capitalistic determinism and essentialism. By charting a course for the process of anthroecological succession from hunter-gatherer to agricultural to industrial societies, it is implied that modern industrialized humans represent a “climax state” of this process of succession, invoking largely discounted theories of “equilibrium ecology” that have since been replaced with nonequilibrium models (Scoones, 1999).

The Anthropocene

The Anthropocene has been proposed as a term to mark the beginning of a new geological epoch, one that is characterized by the enormous impact that humanity has had upon the planet and its biogeochemical processes. The combined effects on global processes resulting from climate change, urbanization, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, nuclear experimentation, and the mass manufacturing of toxins have led many to conclude that humanity is a primary planet- shaping force. First put forth by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2002 (Lorimer, 2012), the notion of the Anthropocene has caught hold in both the public mind, despite not being an officially accepted scientific premise.

The Anthropocene concept (along with the related idea of the “great acceleration” (McNeill, 2016) has gained widespread use in academia, the media, and popular culture with little understanding of its origins or deeper implications, posing a challenge to classical philosophical traditions, calling into question fundamental beliefs about the relationship between humanity and nature and arguably even the Cartesian “self-other” distinction. Bruno Latour describes the Anthropocene as “the most decisive philosophical, r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Prologue
• Introduction
• PART I Urban ecosystem justice — a chaotic bricolage of concepts
• PART II Urban ecosystem justice — urban ecosystem justice applications
• PART III Urban ecosystem justice pedagogy
• Conclusion to the book
• Index